Cookies disclaimer

Our site saves small pieces of text information (cookies) on your device in
order to keep sessions open and for statistical purposes. These statistics
aren't shared with any third-party company.
You can disable the usage of cookies by changing the settings of your browser. By
browsing our website without changing the browser settings you grant us
permission to store that information on your device.

We are sorry it has taken
so long to get back to you, but this letter has not been an easy one to write
and things have been difficult here. We are also sorry that what began as a
letter has perhaps become a long “manifestos against a world that we hate” (to quote
one of the lines in your festival’s statement of purpose).

We are writing with a
sadness that reaches to the tips of the fingers with which we type. This
weekend the French Police, acting on the orders of the dictatorship of the
growth economy, killed Remi, a young ecological justice activist. He was a year
older than my son Jack who played the music in We Have Never Been Here
Before. A heavily armoured riot cop shot him in the back probably with a
concussion grenade, the explosion ripped his life away on the spot. The tragedy
took place on La ZAD (Zone A Défendre) du Testet, a new autonomous zone of
ecological resistance inspired by the original ZAD near our farm in france,
where the struggle against a new airport for Nantes, has been successful. The
ZAD du Testet where Remi was murdered is resisting the construction of a dam
that is cutting down hectares of forest and destroying a richly bio-diverse
wetlands eco-system just to water fields of industrial maize. Once again we are
confronted with the fact that when people do more than symbolic action, when
they place their bodies directly against the machines of the system, the
response is violence, extreme violence. We write this letter with sadness, love
and rage in our veins.

As you may know in Dec
2015, the COP21 UN climate summit will be held in Paris, there will be a huge
global citizens mobilisation during the conference. All of the Laboratory of
Insurrectionary Imagination’s (Labofii) work this year will lead towards
creative acts of disobedience during COP21 to pressure the worlds governments
to be coherent between their words and acts. Despite the rhetoric, since the
COP talks began and promised to do something about the climate, emissions have
risen 61%. Science say that radical emission cuts must happen now if we are to
stay within the safe zone of 2 degrees of warming. Meanwhile fossil fuel
companies are planning to continue business as usual, they are banking on a 4
degrees rise which means runaway climate change, a warming could render this
planet with an atmosphere between mars and venus. World climate expert and
head scientist at the British Governments Tyndall centre for Climate Change Research, Kevin Anderson, says that: “ If you have got a population of nine
billion by 2050 and you hit 4C, 5C or 6C, you might have half a billion people
surviving.” This is why some people call it a climate holocaust, pushed by an
economy which puts money in front of life…

For 2015 the Labofii
envisages a series of shows, mass public trainings in the choreography of
protest and performative hackathons in London, Berlin, Hamburg and Paris, where
we will develop efficient new tools of creative resistance to take out into the
streets and conference halls at COP21.

We Have Never Been Here Before, the show that you invited
us to present at the Donau festival, is explicitly about the personal and
political obstacles in the fight against catastrophic climate change and the
accompanying workshop for artists and activists, explores both psychological
and strategic questions of how we can act in the face of such challenges[1].
But it is first time the
Laboffii had done a piece that stays in the theatre and does not take to the
streets, does not disobey, in many ways it was the kind of work we normally
would call “pictures politics”, representations of political action, art
“about” politics, definitely not our “normal’ practice. It’s what we jokingly
call our “holidays in representation” (our last “holiday in representation” was
when we produced the book/film Pfade durch Utopia, Nautilus, 2012). We
Have Never Been Here Before was an admission of weakness and a moment of
reflection on the efficacy or not of the work we have been doing over the last
decade.

A lot of the so-called
“political art” in the art world pretends to do politics. At best it is
purely symbolic protest, at worst it builds ‘zoos’ to observe the authentic
‘real’ activists. As you know the Laboffii believes that the role of art is not
to show the world to people, but to transform it directly. We don’t want to
make political art but to render politics artistic. This is why most of our
work involves bringing artists and activists together to create new forms of
civil disobedience which are then enacted in the public sphere. However this
attachment to materially transforming social life, goes for both our art
practice and our everyday life, for we cannot separate them.

In order to
make art
politically we have to pay attention not just to everyday life but to the
mechanisms of reproduction in the world of culture. In a geek like way this
means that every time we get an invite from a theatre or festival, museum or
biennial before we accept, we look at the list of sponsors. You can imagine our
faces when we saw on the front page of your festival site in big white letters,
an advert for the “Preferred Carrier”: Austrian airlines. “We fly your smile”
is their motto.

Perhaps the
smile refers to the fact that thanks to offsetting we can still fly without
feeling guilty, Austrian airlines are proud that you can pay someone else to
plant a tree or set up a windmill to assuage a climate crime. But offsetting is
about as rational a response to the problem as was paying for absolutions to
redeem your sins in the middle age. In the Dutch republic of the 15th
century there was a price for each sin, to be payed to the church who would
offset it through prayer. For example absolution for incest was afforded at 36
livres, three ducats, whilst if you poisoned someone it was a sixth of the
price.[2]
Kevin Anderson, refuses to fly and thinks that “Offsetting is worse than doing
nothing. It is without scientific legitimacy, is dangerously misleading and
almost certainly contributes to a net increase in the absolute rate of global
emissions growth.” Keep consuming, keep polluting, no need to change our
behaviour, business as usual with a nice greenwash tint. But it’s not just
greenwashing that is useful to corporations at the moment, it is also
artwashing, the magic slight of hand that transforms ‘radical’ art into a tool
for upholding the status quo.

Many of our
artists and intellectual friends fly from biennial to festival, from one city
to another to make “radical culture”. It’s all part of the “rights” of the
hyper mobile cultural class, a global generation that that has been uprooted
from any material place, ripped from local communities, distanced from contexts
where they might have some agency in transforming the material world. It suits
the status quo that the radical thinkers and makers don’t have a territory,
belong to nowhere and float in an abstract vapid world where no solution is
graspable, where radical thinking has no anchor in action. But as John Berger
says “to improve something, you really need to know the texture, the life story
of that thing”, and knowing the story of somewhere takes a lot longer than a
festival or a residency, according to some farmers it can take a thousand years
to know a place.

The Tyndall
Centre says residents of the UK need to cut their CO2 emissions by 90% by 2050
(others say by 2030) if we are to have a chance to avoid runaway climate chaos
and to equitably distribute the right to emit CO2 globally. Its worth
remembering that a single runway of a large european airport can emit more than
the entire CO2 emissions of a large african country and that if it were a
country air transport alone would be 7th on the list of largest
present day CO2 emitters. At the moment the average Briton emits 9.5 tonnes per
year (an Austrian 7.9) One flight from the UK to New York and back emits 1.2
tonnes, which equals, if we have to cut by 90%, the total amount of C02 a Briton
could use per year to keep the climate safe and just. That would mean anyone
really believing in climate justice who flew to New York, for instance to the
recent People Climate March called by Ban Ki Moon, would use up their annual
credit on the trip alone and that means for an entire year could not eat, take
a train, use the internet, put the lights on… nothing.

What is it in
our culture that makes some people think that their presence to such events is
so vital that it trumps the need to reduce global emissions? The capitalist
chasm between our beliefs and behaviour is spreading as fast as the desert…

Looking beyond
the front page of the festival website we also went to the sponsors page, where
we discovered not only Vienna International Airport, but also EVN which owns
coal fired power stations and distributes gas across Europe. Coal fired power
stations are not only directly responsible for taking our world to a place with
temperatures similar to hell, but they also releases a constant stream of mercury,
nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxide, and a range of other toxins that enter our
bodies and inflict serious damage to our soft vital organs and those of every
animal in its vicinity. Dirty money can’t get more dirty than coal.

Then we saw
that on the top of the list of sponsors is the distinct black and yellow logo
of Austria’s biggest bank Raiffeisen. In 2011 Raiffeisen
won a financial “deal of the year” award for their funding of
a Russian oil companies’ new refinery and for setting up export
infrastructure for siberian open cast coal! Like every bank it has a fossil
fuels equity portfolio filled with oil, coal, gas and fracking companies from
across the world.

Recent research
shows that 21st century climate crisis has been caused largely by just 90
companies, many of them household names – BP, Exxon, Shell, Chevron, Gazprom –
which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions
generated since the dawning of the industrial age[3].
Half of those emissions have occurred in the last 25 years, the generation that
has known about the dangers of climate change. But all of these companies are
fueled by banks, without their capital no oil, gas or coal ever leaves the ground.
If our culture perceived these banks as part of the problem rather than as
partners, perhaps the future would not be cancelled. If these companies were
forced by popular social movements to shift their investments away from fossil
fuels, maybe we would be winning.

It comes as no
surprise that another cultural institution is providing the social approval and
progressive sheen on companies whose toxic activities have nothing to do with a
sustainable and just future. Your enthusiastic presentation of the festival
says you desire “a paradigm shift in society”, but these companies continue
business as usual and they are using art as the perfect mask of hypocrisy, a
moral offset for their ‘sins’. In fact the best way to look at it is not that
these companies are supporting the arts, but that the arts are supporting their
lie that they care about anything other than making profits even though it
means annihilating the life support systems of this planet. In fact this kind
of sponsorship is an act of anesthesia, something that numbs us, stops us
perceiving the reality that is at the root of our poisonous capitalist culture,
it is quite the opposite of an aesthetic act, an act that enables us to feel
the world, to sense it deep within our guts.

Of course, some
will respond that “without flying the international art world cannot continue”,
that in a climate of general budget cuts festivals desperately need money to
put up shows that inspire, that we need to live in the “real world” and that
sometimes compromises need to be made in order to survive…

Such logic
seems absurd to us: do we really want to continue the survival of the
international art world at the expense of the survival of our species on this
planet. Or do we want an art world that provides models for other ways of
living and behaving in this one ?

“Art is simply paying
attention,” wrote Alan Kaprow, the american artist who was credited for
creating the first “Happenings” – performances where the line between artists
and audience, art and life were blurred. In this world where our attention is
being bombarded by neurone stimulating semiotic goods 24/7, the Labofii finds
this definition of art fitting. We are witnessing a non stop psychic war of
images and information waged by capitalism over life, which is having a deep
psychic affect on our lives. Like the burdening of our atmosphere with too much
CO2, our synapses cannot keep up with the mass of information, our psychic
landscape has been transformed by weapons of mass distraction in the war for
profit and growth.

We no longer have time for
attention, the overload leads us to paralysing panic, where changing our world
feels as out of reach as true joy. “The economic crisis” Franco “bifo” Berardi
writes, “depends for the most part on the circulation of sadness, depression,
panic and demotivation.”[4]
For the Labofii “paying attention” is an inherently political definition of
art, because a moment of “attention” is an act of disobedience and desertion
from the chaos of a society of mass attention deficit disorder.

The Society
of the Spectacle is “unity in separation” said Guy Debord. Two generations
later, this vision perfectly describes our present, the realm of extreme
separation where we are violently separated from our needs and desires. It’s a
world without worlds, where we are split from our food sources, from our soil,
from our plants and our water. The worlds that sustain our life have become
alien, unknown planets. We have forgotten how to make our shelter, how to heal
ourselves, how to clothe ourselves. We feel alienated from the bacteria that
makes up 10 percent of our body weight and yet keeps us alive. We witness 200
species being pushed to extinction every day by the economy, and yet we think
this will somehow not affect us.

This society of
separation creates a world where we can think one thing and do another, where
we can have a set of ethics that are totally separate from our actions, where
we can engage in political ideas which are never lived in our everyday life.
“Oh I know I shouldn’t buy these H&M jeans,” says the conscience consumer,
“I know they were made in sweatshops… (sigh) but they suit me so well and I
really NEED a new pair don’t I ?” Perhaps we don’t even know how to link how we
feel to how we behave anymore. Last year a journalist revealed that apple godhead and guru, Steve Jobs,
refused his children access to i-phones and i-pads, because he thought they
would be detrimental to their psychological health; but it did not stop him
marketing such devices to millions of other peoples children across the world.

“A certain discipline of attention”[5]
is how The Invisible Committee describes communism, in their manifesto CALL,
which celebrates a radical exodus from the metropolis. To “pay attention” to
the world is communicating with it, its a tool against separation and
distraction, its a weapon of reciprocal relationship. It means observing the
world in the same way an artists observes her material, the cook his
ingredients, the dancer her gestures, the gardener her seeds, the hacker her code.
Its an act of focused sensing, not just with the eyes, but with the entire
sensible mind and body. Kaprow might have called this ‘art’, but Bhuddist call
it “mindfullness”, neuroscientists “direct experience”, christian’s
“contemplation” and in arabic it is know as “sabr” – a key practice of islam.
This surrendering to the present moment that seems to be a central ritual
practice of human society, bypasses the existential ego of the self and
overcomes the anxiety of past and future. In such a state we can experience
information coming into our senses in real time, we pay attention to the world
once again. If art is simply paying attention, then not only does it escape
from the prisons of the art world and from the clutches of the creative classes
monopoly on it, but it enables us to make conscious ethical choices free from
the terrorising autopilot of consumer capitalism.

Far from some
kind of spiritual retreat from the world, for the Labofii this “paying
attention” leads us to making material decisions about our everyday life, it is
an attempt to melt the boundaries between art and life. As artists and
activists working towards a postcapitalist culture, we want to live the world
we talk and dream about in the present moment, we want to have coherence between
our thoughts and our acts. All our work involves non hierarchical processes, we
have set up an organic farm and commune and we have not taken a flight for ten
years. None of this is to be pure but simply to be coherent, to not
separate our aesthetics from our ethics. And none of this is enough unless we
are also engaged in dismantling the system of capitalism and domination that is
at the root of the crisis.

We were excited
to read your festival’s statement entitled 10 YEARS REDEFINING ARTS. For us the
redefining of art, or what Joseph Beuys would call “expanding the concept of
art”, is a central question in the age of the Anthropocene[6].
In such an age, the ancient distinction between natural history and human history,
between culture and nature collapses and so must art must change radically. We
must unshackle ourselves from representation, tear down the walls between art
and life and re distribute creativity to everyone. Following Kaprow’s vision of
the future of art might help us: “We may see the overall meaning of art change
profoundly” he wrote “from being an end to being a means, from holding out a
promise of perfection in some other realm to demonstrating a way of living
meaningfully in this one.”

In your
statement we read that the aim of Donau festival is “to establish a radically new festival model, which, on the
one hand, would correspond to the ideas and needs of emergent art forms and, on
the other, of a paradigm shift in society.” You also say that the recent focus
is on “central global themes such as the human-animal-nature relationship,
exploitation, exclusion, repression, and migration” and “we will dream with our
artists of societal counter models, of ephemeral anarchic world concepts; we
will tend paradisiacal gardens in our minds and wed ourselves with plants and
animals; we will proclaim vehement visual, sonic, and vocal manifestos against
a world that we hate and draft fragile, tender declarations of love to a world
that we dream of and believe can become reality.” The words are really
beautiful, the ideas are courageous and we share them with you. But do they fit
with the reality ? Or are they purely symbolic gestures thrown without paying
attention into the winds of the coming storms.

When you write
that you want “a paradigm shift in society” how do u imagine this change will
take place ? How can a festival like this which props up the “old world that we
hate” be part of the change ? Do you think capitalist culture will somehow
undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane, equitable and sustainable way of
living ? We think not, we think we have to undo this culture completely and
rebuild entirely different ways of being and sharing of our worlds. No real
solutions to this crisis will be put in place by those in power if it means
them not profiting from it. As escaped slave Frederick Douglas knew so well
when he was fighting the horrors of the slave trade and declared “Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. “

For us at the
Labofii the goal can be summed up in a sentence: to remove the ability of
the rich to steal from the poor and dismantle the ability of the powerful to
destroy our biosphere. The role of art for us is to make this process as
creative, desirable and effective as possible – to stop the war of money
against life in the most beautiful way possible. Sadly we don’t see how we can
do this by being part of the Donaufestival without violently tearing our ethics
from our aesthetics.

Perhaps in an
age of extreme ecological and social crisis, the key questions artists and
curators need to ask themselves are: Can these the institutions of culture be
machines for amplifying our potential to transform the status quo, or are they
palaces carefully engineered for us to play the fool in, whilst outside the
kings and queens continue to play Russian roulette with our future whilst
enriching theirs.

Initially when
we saw the sponsors we decided we would come to the festival, do the show,
redistribute our fees to activists on front line communities against climate
catastrophe in the global south and organise an intervention against the very
sponsors themselves. We would launch a kind of infiltrated undercover guerrilla
action that bites the hand that feeds. We do not care about spoiling our
reputation within the world of art, we don’t care to not be invited back, we
care about the political efficacy of art more than our careers. We have done
this before, most infamously when the Tate Modern tried to stop us taking
actions against their sponsors British Petroleum, during a workshop they
themselves commissioned on disobedience[7].

We wrote to the
Yes Men and Reverend Billy who were also invited to the Donaufestival, to see
if we could set up a two day Hackathon in Krems with them to co-plan actions
against Raiffeisen. But we soon realised that even if we did do this,
the actions themselves would simply be symbolic, would not really have much of
an effect, the fossil fuels would continue to be sucked out of the ground and
burnt and we would just be the fools in the palace once again, playing the old
role of shocking the bourgeoisie and needlessly upsetting you the curators.

But we don’t
want to pretend to do politics in the art world. And so we are stuck. We did
not know how to proceed, of course we wanted to come, we love making work, we
love performing and we thrive off the creative ebullience of festivals. We have
never seen the Danube river in its all its glory and we were excited to spend
time with some of the art activists and friends we most admire, the Yes Men and
Reverend Billy. But how to do so without becoming part of the machinery that we
want to dismantle ? How do we avoid even an act of self sabotage being easily
digested by the boundless appetite of the art world ? If we were cynical we
would just accept the fact that we would be recuperated and go for it – it’s
the “shitty reality”. But cynicism is simply another word for obedience to the
system and we don’t want to dwell in the shit of reality, thats why we make
art.

And so we would
like this letter, or manifesto, or whatever it is, to be a proposal for a
dialogue about what a “radically new festival model” could look like rather
than just a shut door that says sorry we can’t take part. We would like it to
be the start of something rather than the end, something more than symbolic
words or acts we share together. Something that helps put bodies in the way of
the machine rather than greasing its cogs.

[1] The blurb advertising the workshop begins: “Faced
with the immensity and complexity of the catastrophic entwining of ecological,
economic and social crises that threaten our entire way of life, in fact
threatens life itself, we often feel paralysed. “We could do more”, our
intuition nags at us, and yet something holds us back from actions commensurate
with the scale of the problem.” The two day intensive workshop ends with
a collective brain storm, using dozens of ping pong balls, to design actions of
creative disobedience against the corporate take over of the UN COP processes
in Paris. We hope to tour the show and workshop to mobilise for Paris and later
in the year, to develop a series of Hackathons and theatrical mass disobedience
trainings all aimed at preparing for the mobilisations in Dec 2015.

[6] The Anthropocene is a proposed new
geological epoch where there are more trees growing in farms than in the wild,
where more rock and soil is moved by bulldozers and mining than all ‘natural’
processes combined and where the climate is tipping out of control due to the
burning of oil, gas and coal. Industrial capitalism is irreversibly altering
the natural cycles of the biosphere, nature is now a product of culture. It is
not longer just asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions that herald mass
extinctions, it is us, the 20% of the world that is consuming 80% of it’s
resources.

[7] In 2009 the Labofii was invited to hold workshops in art and activism at
Tate Modern, they entitled it ‘Disobedience makes history’. The Tate curators
wanted the workshop to end with a public performance intervention. When the
Laboffii was told, in an email, by the curators that no interventions could be
made against the museums sponsors (which happen to be British Petroleum) the
Labofii decided to use the email as the material for the workshop. We projected
it onto the wall and asked the participants whether the workshop should obey or
disobey the curator’s orders. Despite Tate staff trying to sabotage the
discussion taking place, the participants ended up making an action against
BP’s sponsorship and afterwards set up a collective Liberate Tate dedicated to
liberating the Tate from its oil barons. The collective has since made global
headlines with its creative unauthorised interventions in the museum, often
using lots of black molasses. Of course the Labofii will never be invited back
to the Tate.